The project
Trainyard is a 2010 iOS game, from the old-school iPhone/iPod Touch era. It was really popular! Almost 25000 people created more than 162000 custom levels for the game. People are still fans to this day -- every once in a while, someone finds their old iOS device and boots the game back up.
Unfortunately, the level server -- the online component that allowed users to download levels -- is no longer running. This means that none of the 162000 levels can be downloaded anymore. Until now!
I talked to
Matt Rix, the creator of Trainyard, and he graciously gave me a copy of all 162000 user-created levels and gave me permission to carry out a preservation project for these levels.
He was also wonderful enough to, as of 2025,
restore the online leaderboard. While it's still not possible to download the levels directly to your device, you can browse them online!
This project and associated resources are all you need to bring these levels back locally on your iOS device.
The archive
The archive contains the following files:
- documentation: instructions on how to restore the levels if you own a copy of the game.
- engi_puzzles.csv: the database of all levels, including level and solution data (everything needed to restore the level), creator name (pseudonymized), level title, description, difficulty, views, likes etc. There is also a link to each puzzle on trainyard.ca.
- level_images.zip: preview images for every level in the database, grouped in subfolders by level number (you'll get it). Inside the archive, extra_images.txt is a list of all levels that have preview images but are missing from the database, and missing_images.txt is a list of all levels that are in the database but are missing a preview image.
- blueprint_images.zip: preview images of solutions to custom puzzles submitted to the online leaderboard. solutions to built-in puzzles are not included. there is no corresponding database or author information for these solutions. restoring these into a machine-readable form or associating them with the original level is beyond the scope of this project, but it should be doable with an image analyzer. Inside the archive, missing_images.txt is a list of all blueprint images that are missing, assuming that blueprints are sequentially numbered.
- trainyard_engineer_db.csv: a special form of the level database that is compatible with the way Trainyard stores levels internally.
- creator_id_name.csv: a list of creator IDs and their (pseudonymized) names.
- examples: a folder of example level database files, if you want to directly transfer levels to the device using method 2 in the instructions.
How to use
If you have an old iOS 8.x or lower device and have purchased a copy of Trainyard, download the archive and follow the instructions in the documentation folder on how to restore access to community levels.
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